“I felt like I got the gist of this autism stuff,” Nathan says after struggling to complete an autism test in front of a facility manager. Known for his painfully awkward communication style, he’s at an autism center not for himself, but to build credibility for a congressional meeting about aviation safety. He’s filming for the second season of The Rehearsal, a meta-documentary that becomes as much about the making of the show as its ostensible subject matter. It follows in the conceptual wake of season one, where the central premise was to help people prepare for, or “rehearse,” difficult life scenarios. The Rehearsal belongs to a broader ecosystem of shows examining performance and authenticity: absurd business schemes that test people’s willingness to participate (Nathan For You), mundane tutorial premises spiraling into questions about human connection and urban alienation (How to With John Wilson), and attempts to create an ethical dating show without manipulating participants for entertainment (The Show About The Show).
Like Nathan, I spend my days trying to effect change through creative work: monitoring a pitches inbox where we reject upwards of eighty percent of submissions, curating unknown writers for a literary magazine. But where Nathan uses elaborate scenarios to expose how people perform authenticity, the editorial process itself becomes a rehearsal for authenticity—for writers packaging their vulnerability and for editors who must authenticate our own vision while shaping others’ work. We’re both trapped in cycles of having to authenticate our own authenticity while trying to create something meaningful.
The shows mentioned above reveal something crucial about the current state of creating: they expose the recursive process of trying to understand what we’re making while we’re making it. They are simultaneously about the labor of appearing normal in a surveilled society and the labor of creating authentic art in a medium built on strategic manipulation: of other people, television conventions, and audience perception. If reality TV “has wrenched the willing suspension of disbelief into new forms,” as A.S. Hamrah writes, forcing viewers to “pretend to enjoy” what they know isn’t real, then these shows push that concept to its breaking point: they’re about creators who know they’re performing authenticity for an audience that knows it’s watching a performance of authenticity. The exhausting psychological overhead of this self-awareness—where everyone is simultaneously performer, audience, and critic—becomes the show’s content. What emerges is a new kind of documentary that’s less about documenting reality than about documenting the impossibility of documenting reality without fundamentally altering it. In editorial work, we face a similar impossibility: we can’t cover books without altering their legacy, which raises the stakes of each pitch we accept.
The relationship between audience and artist has shifted: readers want backstories. We’re in the era of The Relentless Interrogation of the Author, where biographical details, creative process, and personal inspiration become as important as the work itself. Even in our pitches inbox, writers send their origin stories, trauma narratives, explanations of “real” encounters that compel them to cover a certain book. In The Rehearsal season two, Nathan admits that “every public opportunity I’ve had in my life to convey sincerity, I’ve, instead, turned into a joke.” But he’s done something more than simple sabotage: he creates art and creates a persona around creating that art, turning the act of creation into another layer of performance. The work becomes inseparable from its origin story, and Nathan finds himself trapped in an endless cycle of having to authenticate his own authenticity—exactly what happens as writers drown in the signifiers of social media success as stand-ins for work of substance. The plan: turn that very impossibility into this season’s subject matter.
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“I’ve always felt sincerity is overrated. It just ends up punishing those who can’t perform it as well as others,” Nathan observes in The Rehearsal season two, a comment that might finally lay to rest the overexposed sincerity vs irony debate. Whether earnest or detached, both modes require perfect control. Authenticity itself is a skill unevenly distributed. Writers who can’t perform it well get rejected not for their ideas, but for their inability to package vulnerability correctly. Words create a world, after all. I have a friend who worked on one of Fielder’s shows. “He’s a weird guy,” she told me, insinuating he was limited by social awkwardness. This limitation is the basis of his creative strategy.
He may be “weird,” but social manipulation is something he excels at, at least when given a camera crew. Over four seasons of Nathan for You (2013–2017), Fielder exposed the absurdity of modern business culture by offering outlandish marketing proposals to struggling businesses in Southern California. Some became viral sensations that fooled mainstream media (“Dumb Starbucks,” “Petting Zoo”). Some were David-vs-Goliath battles against corporate giants (“Andy vs. Uber,” “Electronics Store”). Some transformed entire industries through fake fitness crazes (“The Movement”). Several were food-based experiments in consumer psychology (“Yogurt Shop,” “Pizzeria,” “Burger Joint,” “Chili Shop”). Some departed entirely from the business format to become elaborate personal stunts (“The Anecdote,” “The Hero,” “The Claw of Shame”). It’s a show that’s hard to binge. It’s too cruel, the way Nathan shamelessly pushes business owners in increasingly absurd directions, these clients totally unaware they’ll appear on a comedy show.
I always wonder what character I, or my friends, might play on such a show—much like I wonder what characters writers are playing as they build a portfolio and pitch us their work. Fielder has a particular genius for exploiting social paralysis: the difficulty of directly contradicting someone who appears utterly self-assured, especially when the cameras are rolling, and especially when, as it seems, you’ve been vetted as someone too polite, narcissistic, optimistic, weak-willed, or desperate to rock the boat. Since this isn’t traditional reality TV—there are no “rules” beyond social convention—the ways people act are simply who they are when stripped of clear behavioral frameworks and confronted with, shall we say, Nathan’s personality. The unsaid exerts great power, and the result is a script stranger than fiction. If I weren’t so busy laughing from a place of presumed safety, what character would I play?
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The Rehearsal tackles the same key themes as Nathan For You—failed systems, social anxiety, and Fielder’s weirdness—with an added meta element: how people perceive him and how he moves forward from his reputation of making participants the butt of jokes. The show emerged from Fielder’s growing obsession with prediction; during Nathan for You, he and his team would anticipate scenarios—shuffle the present—before filming, yet people consistently confounded their expectations. And so emerged The Rehearsal, which shifts from helping businesses to helping people rehearse difficult conversations.
Season one, episode one follows Kor, a trivia player who’s spent a decade lying to his teammates about having gone to grad school. Nathan goes to extreme lengths to help him by constructing an exact replica of their usual trivia bar, hiring actors to play each regular, having an actor secretly stalk and learn to mimic one of his teammates, then rehearsing the confession dozens of times. After one episode, though, this premise quickly devolves into Nathan co-parenting with a devout Christian named Angela, using rotating child actors to simulate raising their “son” Adam from infancy to adolescence (with a B-plot where Nathan systematizes his obsessive methods into an actual acting class).
Nathan’s parents come to visit, and his mother berates him for not raising Adam to be Jewish. Nathan wonders why she would care about something that’s not real, and she tells him, “Sometimes you feel like it’s easier to just go along with things rather than, you know, deal with the tension.” Huh. So this bit, it turns out, is personal, and his ability to maintain control exists, perhaps, only on the show, and not so much in his personal life. Or, rather, his ability to maintain control comes from his refusal to engage with people seriously. It’s always got to be a joke. An extreme avoidant type, you could say. I guess that makes sense. Getting someone to participate in a months-long fake motherhood scenario doesn’t translate to the ability to maintain a healthy romantic relationship. Go figure.
The central tragedy emerges when six-year-old actor Remy, being raised by a single mom, becomes genuinely attached to Nathan as a father figure, refusing to break character even after his time on the show ends. Nathan has to explain to a confused child, in the kid’s actual home, that their relationship is just pretend. When he asks Remy’s mother how she knows her son will be ok, she smiles and says “I just know,” which perturbs Nathan. Haunted by whether his “obsessive need to control and rehearse every aspect of life was actually causing real harm to real people,” Nathan goes farther down the rabbit hole of his own rehearsal. In the season finale, he rehearses what Remy’s mother might have done to help her son move on, with Nathan playing the mother and a new nine-year-old actor, Liam, playing Remy. Nathan (as the mother) tells Liam (as Remy) “I’m always going to be there for you, because I’m your dad,” to which Liam (as Liam) whispers, “Wait, I thought you were my mom.” Nathan appears genuinely surprised with himself—lost in a puzzle of his own design. Or maybe just wanting us to think he was. Either way, season one is about his obsession with control through rehearsal backfiring completely—he finds a real connection with a child and has no script for how to deal with it. It’s the same trap I resist when editing: the impulse to over-control, to rehearse the life out of a piece and get lost in the plot.
Three years later, season two becomes about Nathan’s career, and how he might effect real change through his art. With every season he produces, he becomes more introspective, and in retrospect we can see that the great project he undertakes is to learn to see himself as an artist.
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By now Nathan’s format is well-known, to the point that Nathan For You had to stop: since the show depended on his not being recognizable, the more popular it got, the more difficult it became to find unwitting business that would agree to work with him. With season two of The Rehearsal, he pivots towards a seemingly legitimate, non-comedy goal: make aviation safer by bringing awareness to pilot communication failures. It’s hard to believe, yet it tracks with his previous work. You can easily rewrite the history of his projects as exposing fundamental flaws in systems we take for granted, as well as our general inability to speak up in uncomfortable situations, especially when an authority figure is involved. I think about this dynamic in my own editorial work—as my title has gotten higher at CRB, I wonder whether writers are now less likely to feel comfortable pushing back against my edits.
Nathan For You was partly inspired by Fielder’s fascination with the subprime mortgage crisis: how groups of people sensed something was wrong, but were too afraid to speak up. Miscommunication, anxiety: another mundane, constant part of contemporary urban life. I can imagine season two of The Rehearsal as a John Wilson episode: “How to Fly Economy.” Wilson would start with a basic question about air travel, encounter some bizarre characters (perhaps Jeff, the pilot banned from “every dating app”), and end up stumbling into the deeper psychological issues that make flying at once routine and terrifying.
Nathan’s aviation obsession follows this same logic. He studies flight data and discovers most crashes happen because first officers are too afraid to contradict pilots making bad calls. So he uses The Fielder Method to help first officers become more assertive, creating, as ever, increasingly elaborate scenarios. He has a young pilot practice a difficult conversation with his girlfriend mid-flight. He has a group of people follow one pilot around to help build confidence. He stages a music contest show where first officers reject performers to their faces. Most bizarrely, he attempts to inhabit the psychology of Captain Sully by recreating his entire life from birth—a rehearsal complete with a giant crib, full-body shaving, and a deep dive into his post-iPod Evanescence phase. Through this process, Nathan concludes that pilots are fundamentally socially awkward and emotionally repressed, a condition exacerbated by an industry that can ban them from flying for disclosing mental health issues.
Like the first officers Nathan later studies, I have a job where I need to be comfortable saying no to people. I try to imagine doing it face-to-face, like the officers on the singing competition, potential writers performing for me their pitches. That would be an impossible job, deciding on the spot. But if writers and editors weren’t so wily and cautious, we would make for good television.
This time, rather than expose it for comedy, Nathan actually wants to solve the problem. But the reception has been largely dismissive. Since the show aired, Congress has refused meetings about pilot training reform. On CNN, Fielder called the FAA “dumb” for rejecting his findings. The Air Line Pilots Association criticized his proposals as being based on “fictional TV shows or comedy routines” rather than “decades of research, training, and real-world experience.” Fielder is confronting art’s great impossibility: how to actually effect change through creative work. It’s the dilemma we all face as editors and writers: that what we do might be pointless compared to direct action.
The Plan: start a magazine that reviews books outside of their publicity cycle at almost double the length of other review outlets, publishing unknown writers we don’t know from the pitches inbox. With a shoestring budget, end up becoming one of the most widely read little magazines in America. Run it at a deficit for seven years then, once everyone is hooked, sell discounted subscriptions at an unbeatable price. It’s the rare Nathan Fielder plan that succeeded because of its commitment to a craft everyone assumed was dying.
Still, the question lingers. Can you ever shed a past identity? The past is haunting, and life, if it’s going to make sense, only does so in retrospect. All the little decisions add up to something. If you’re a comedian, you have no business speaking to Congress. Fielder may have overestimated his aim.
Since pilots aren’t supposed to fly if they’re diagnosed with any mental health issues, Nathan, before he flies a real 737 for the show’s season finale, orders a full brain scan to check for autism. When he learns the results won’t be ready until after his scheduled flight, he goes ahead and self-discloses that he’s never been formally diagnosed—which, after all, is true. “They only let the smartest and best people fly a plane of this size, and it’s nice to know that,” Fielder says over a montage of him successfully landing multiple aircrafts. It’s as if he’s saying: can an autistic person do this? This is something I feel I do with my writing every day: use it to prove I belong in rooms where I fear I don’t. I have a similar fear of doctors, or really anyone examining who I am too closely. I haven’t even been to a hairdresser in almost ten years because I’m terrified of someone casting judgment on my split ends, my dry scalp, my inability to perform basic self-care. It’s the same way I avoid doctors who might provide me with diagnoses. As long as I never receive an official diagnosis, my human condition remains in the realm of normal. If no authority figure is there to tell me something is wrong, then I’m doing just fine. I’m not made of holes, after all. I like Nathan’s magical thinking, because I live it every day.
In the first episode of The Rehearsal, Kor—the trivia player who’s been lying about his master’s degree—makes an observation that cuts to the heart of Nathan’s entire project. He compares Nathan to Willy Wonka, and it’s more apt than either realizes. Both Fielder and Wonka promise transformation through elaborate scenarios, creating worlds where normal rules don’t apply so they can test others while remaining fundamentally unknowable themselves. Wonka never submits to psychological evaluation despite being clearly unhinged; Nathan gets his brain scan, but doesn’t disclose the results to the public. We never learn what drives either character, and what appears to be their real self strikes one just as much as a performance. Nathan’s autism question hangs over the entire second season precisely because he’s constructed a world where he can observe everyone else’s psychology while keeping his own safely theoretical.
The Rehearsal season two suggests a bleak answer to whether art can actually change anything. But maybe that makes it the perfect rehearsal: if season one was about losing control as a person, season two is about losing control as an artist.
Brianna Di Monda
Brianna Di Monda is the editor-in-chief of the magazine you are reading. Learn more at www.bridimonda.com.